What I told you about making reviews publicly available is correct. There’s no AMS policy against, nor any formal objection to, an author making the contents of anonymous reviews and responses public. If a reviewer provides his or her name, or if there is other information that makes it possible to discern the identity of the reviewer, such information should be redacted unless the reviewer grants permission.

In the context of this, I would think that publishing an anonymous review and speculating as to the identity of the reviewer would be unethical. The author, if making the review public, has a duty to preserve the anonymity of the reviewer.

Regarding reviewers with an apparent or real conflict of interest, the leadership makes the point that atmospheric science is a relatively small field, and in many cases it can be effectively impossible to find anybody sufficiently knowledgeable about the research area who would not have at least the appearance of a conflict of interest. Conversely, editors will generally be aware of the people in the field and will know whether certain reviewers may be biased for or against a certain point of view, and reviewers have the responsibility to notify the editor of a potential conflict of interest. It’s up to the editor to take such possible conflicts of interest into account when considering reviews, and the authors themselves can (and do) notify the editor when a particular review doesn’t seem fair. The process places a lot of faith in editors to do their jobs well, so editors are selected carefully, they are monitored through their terms, and complaints against editors are taken seriously…

[Emphasis added.]

[Addendum, 5:15 PM Feb. 11: A bit of discussion regarding my comments at Stoat (last in thread here) has popped up over at ClimateAudit. I submitted a response to ClimateAudit. It has not (or at least has not yet) survived moderation, so I’m posting the main points here. I probably used too many asterisks for the spam filter.

I would be quite p***ed if, as happened here, a reviewer said he thought a particular technique was probably the best choice and then publicly criticized me for “choosing” to use it.

As I interpret it, Steig’s review comment was not a ringing endorsement of iridge but rather an insistence on whatever produces the “most likely” results which, later on in the paragraph, is “perhaps” iridge. I hope, had I been in O’Donnell’s position, I would have been level-headed enough to realize that this was probably not a set-up but may instead have been a case of Steig not remembering that this amounted to his own insistence on iridge as a reviewer.

However, I would have been familiar enough with the review process to have not assumed that Steig saw my third set of responses. I might then have attributed to Steig the offense of not reviewing the comments and responses to make sure he wasn’t criticizing me for something he himself had agreed was the best choice. And it did come off as personal criticism, through the choice of language “[they] choose to use” rather than something fairer, such as “All techniques have shortcomings. This particular one…”

Then, I probably would have taken pleasure in my public rebuttal to Steig’s criticism, already having handy as a response my response to his third review. I might even have included an excerpt from an anonymous review, showing that the reviewers agreed with our choice so strongly that they insisted on it.

O’Donnell made the opposite assumption, that Steig had seen the third response, which doubtless made it appear to him that Steig was taking advantage of his anonymous access to the reviews and responses and using it to his advantage against O’Donnell. We all know what happened next.

The fact that Steig had identified himself to O’Donnell does not provide license to reveal his identity to the world, especially if he is also publishing the content of the reviews. On the occasions when I sign my name to a review, I would expect the review to be treated like private correspondence unless I give my permission for it to be made public. And Steig didn’t sign his name to the review; he admitted privately to his reviewer status only after a series of public insinuations and a direct question from the author.]